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Famicom/NES / Modern handheld with Gamezone II games?
« on: November 15, 2024, 04:05:32 PM »
I came across a YouTube video showing an odd emulation-based handheld dubbed the "Great Boy". For whatever reason, it includes four of the "Gamezone II"-affiliated arcade ports (Scramble, Moon Cresta, Missile Command, and Frogger); which almost never surface on other plug & plays. Judging by an Amazon review of the console with screenshots (https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R140J8JZN7UT02), it dates back to at least 2021; whereas the Gamezone II was only dumped online in late 2023.

The Great Boy only includes 20 games total (despite the Amazon page claiming 1015 games, though it may be that the others are hidden on a microSD); with around half of them being common Nice Code derivatives. However, there are six additional games which I do not recognize at all: Falling Fruit, Lost Home, Match, Pong, Sky Up, and Tic Tac Toe. Pong is the only one to feature a title screen, and appears to be NES-based; I can't tell if the other games are based on Famicom/NES hardware or something customized for the handheld.

I felt this system was worth noting here due to the obscurity of the games included, and it could be something worth looking into further. Here is the YouTube video of the console (note that it's recorded by a young child): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS5HI-kNqsQ

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Famicom/NES / Bad dump or ludicrous protection?
« on: November 10, 2024, 11:23:45 AM »
A 319-in-1 handheld console was recently dumped, which is labeled as being NES-based in MAME. I was quite curious to see what's on this console, as it appears to use the new "Timemax" game set, with its weird Inventor-based hacks and whatnot.

However, the format of the ROM is...borderline incomprehensible. I initially assumed this was a bad dump, as I could find nothing visible using YY-CHR. I came across graphics resembling the corrupted remains of Donkey Kong Jr. at one address; but inexplicably, it visibly displayed as two Inventor hacks (Rescue Kuck and Conte Enegy) when set to 4BPP SNES/PCE mode. The graphics are seemingly further scrambled from here, swapping the second and third lines compared to the unaltered CHR data.

I still can't make enough sense out of the code to do much with it, but could anyone verify if this actually is some ridiculous scrambling/protection method? MAME does label the ROM as potentially being scrambled, but I'm still tempted to deem this a bad dump to some level. Image example and ROM (with probably-incorrect header) attached below.

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Famicom/NES / Incomplete plug & play restorations/extracts
« on: August 23, 2024, 03:01:04 PM »
Here are four sets of incomplete restorations/extracts of plug & play games. I'm at a loss for how to fix these any further, so if anyone with more technical know-how wants to look at them (no pressure, of course), the attached files include the following:

  • An attempt to restore the original sampled sound data of three Cube Technology VT03 games, based on unused coding of their Waixing counterparts. I referenced the code of the two preexisting restorations of Get Lost and Ocean Prospect (which are in ProjectPNP); in doing so, I was able to get the sound areas to load in, but they merely play a distorted mess of sound effects. I am unsure if this is from me doing something wrong, or if the data is just too far overwritten in Waixing's version to be properly restored.
  • An unknown Nice Code game titled "Final", which can be seen within the shared code of the games Falling and Five Days. The latter two games share the same code structure, with a one-byte difference controlling which game is loaded; this byte can also load the Final code. While the ROM itself loads into the title screen, it does not show anything upon starting the game. I'm inclined to believe the game was literally never finished, though it would be helpful if anyone can verify if it's even attempting to load anything upon pressing Start.
  • A partial restoration of the two-player modes in Greedy, which has said options disabled in all dumped copies. For whatever reason, the "2 Players Team" mode does not play correctly, but the "1P vs 2P" mode (and the menu selection itself) works fine. This definitely seems like something that could be fixed, but I can't think of how.
  • An attempt to extract the Olympic/Track & Field minigames (High Jump and Long Jump) from Nice Code's Pet Dog. The unaltered extracts do not run on their own, but I can convert the first 1000 or so bytes of data to run near-perfectly using the more common variants with human players. However, I was unable to locate some HEX data related to the scoreboard, which seems to display the number/text data incorrectly.

Each folder also contains the unaltered original ROMs used as basis for the modified ROMs.

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2000-present / deep analysis on those guys who made fruit pig
« on: March 23, 2024, 12:14:02 PM »
Recently, I've been attempting to research a specific set of VT02 games from an unclear developer. The games in question are Fruit Pig, Eeeck! A Mouse, Echo Chamber, Trounce, and a Sudoku game. Since there's no clear development company, however - nor are there dozens of games to work off of, like the unknown JungleTac-affiliated developer - I can't really compile it into a wiki page or anything (it's currently just a footnote on the Nice Code Software article as "unconfirmed games", which I somewhat doubt the status of). As such, I thought I'd compile what I've gathered into a list here, so the information is at least out there:

-For a brief gameplay summary (save for self-explanatory Sudoku): Fruit Pig is a simple "catch the fruits" game, Eeeck! A Mouse is a Whac-A-Mole game, Echo Chamber is a clone of Simon (i.e. the board game), and Trounce is loosely based on the Japanese plug & play "Popira". All of them use music from the Famicom game Parasol Henbee.
-Fruit Pig is by far the most common, followed by Sudoku. Both titles appear on many multicarts from the mid-2010s onward (e.g. Super Game 360-in-1, CoolBoy 400-in-1), with Fruit Pig also appearing on the common 200-in-1 plug & play. The other three games are far less common, but sporadically show up on some later 2010s releases.
-With the exception of Sudoku, all of the games only use the d-pad during gameplay; not using the A or B buttons. This suggests to me they were designed for a Dance Dance Revolution mat or some similar special controller.
-Further indicating the above, the first version of the "Double Dance Mania" plug & play features Echo Chamber and Trounce (but not the other titles). The currently dumped revision of Double Dance Mania is the "Technolight Edition", however, which includes different games. Oddly, on the back of the back, the game screenshots are recreated with vector graphics (see https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/lygAAOSwDiZk~LWv/s-l1600.jpg).
-There is a variant of Fruit Pig where the player is replaced with a penguin for some reason (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jS2uOK52-A&t=385s). This may be a Cube Technology hack of the game.
-In my most bizarre find, there is a Russian handheld called the "Exeq Toy" that features what appear to be advanced VT368 hacks of these games. I was able to confirm a game called "Crazymouse" is a conversion of Eeeck! A Mouse (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=ciqfovpXP_Y), but could not find clear enough screenshots/videos of the others. Presumably, going by the game list, "Sudoku 368" is Sudoku, "Fruit New" is Fruit Pig, and "Simon" is Echo Chamber; there's no obvious title listed for Trounce.
-The other unknown games listed on the Exeq Toy are Raptor Rage (port of a mobile game?), Winmine (Minesweeper?), Arameo, Funny Quest, IdolumMaze, Biomatch, and Angel. It also features a game titled "Angry Birds 368", which is a hack of the Super Angry Birds bootleg; as to if that indicates the unknown company made that game as well, who knows.
-Just by fate I suppose, there is a more common (?) revision of the Exeq Toy that features a generic VT02 menu without these games; so tracking a system down would be quite difficult.
-In a recently compiled list by Taizou, he labels the titles as possibly being "Spritemind" games (see https://museum.12bit.club/viewer/ods.php?f=Subor_Q6_game_list.ods). I am assuming this refers to Shenzhen SpriteMind Software Co., Ltd., who is credited on some mid-2010s multicarts (namely the Super Game 150-in-1 with the Sonic splash screen). I could ask Taizou what makes him theorize Spritemind is the developer, but haven't as of currently.
-I have the source GIF that was used as reference for Fruit Pig's character sprite. No idea where the picture in itself is from, but the sprites were modeled after this character.

5
Other Pirates / Atari Gamestation Pro analysis
« on: February 06, 2024, 05:46:10 PM »
My Arcade recently released a "firmware update" for the "Atari Gamestation Pro" console, downloadable via their website (see https://www.myarcadegaming.com/pages/atari-gamestation-firmware-upgrade-to-v-1-3-only). Similarly to the Arcade1UP firmware updates, this update is effectively just a full ROM dump of the console; allowing its entire contents to be viewed using a tool such as 7-Zip.

There is... a lot to note about this console, including the following:

*All emulation is RetroArch-based. It mostly uses unaltered RetroArch cores, though MAME is replaced with a custom (?) fork called "Jungle" (with variants for MAME 2003, 2014, and 2016).
*There is a "games.db" file with cached data related to the SD card. This includes a giant list of pirated ROMs, with names that match those seen on many recent bootleg consoles (e.g. "Little white rabbit lost.nes", which I have a ripped ROM of from another plug & play; it's an unhacked copy of Pyokotan no Dai Meiro). The ROM names are in English, Chinese, Korean, and Thai.
*The Atari 2600 ROMs have various oddities. Two games (Maze Craze and Surround) inexplicably use PAL copies, whereas the PAL prototype of RealSports Basketball uses a fan-made NTSC conversion. Aquaventure (another prototype) uses the bootleg CCE rom, with its hacked copyright; despite that proper Atari copies have existed for years.
*There are 4 or 5 2600 games that I'm almost certain My Arcade/Atari would not have permission to use on the Gamestation. These include Boxing, an unhacked Activision game; Drag Race, a fan-made graphic hack of Activision's "Dragster"; and Space Raid, an 80s bootleg of Activision's "MegaMania". There is also Fast Eddie, a game originally from 20th Century Fox; and the somewhat odd case of Road Runner, which is too complicated to even explain (and as a bonus, it's another CCE rom).
*The console features many "bonus games", all of which are licensed from Piko Interactive. These are mostly nasty copyright hacks of Beam Software NES games and other junk, alongside the detested hacks of prototype games.
*There are two Shiru NES games on this console that have not been dumped previously: POW 2, a 2048 clone, and Gorodki (mislabeled as "Gordoki"), a port of a Soviet arcade game. Note that (AFAIK) these two games were solely designed for use on Famiclone-ish plug & plays; they also appear on the Go Retro Portable. Snakky is also on this console (mislabeled as "Snakki"), which has been dumped previously but is uncommon. There are also two Piko-watermarked homebrew games from "Segaman", Sumo Slam and Switchblade; I'm unsure if these games have been dumped otherwise or not.

I have also created a TCRF article on the Gamestation (https://tcrf.net/Atari_Gamestation_Pro), which features some more technical details (and k-pop test samples). I have attached the three uncommon Shiru games; though not anything with the accursed Piko Interactive watermarks, in case they get angry and insist they're Illegally Obtained Unreleased Nintendo Switch Leaks or whatever. In any case, I created a .txt documenting any weird ROMs I noticed; you can easily download and navigate the firmware update to obtain them (note the game ROMs are on the "data.img" image within the Firmware.img file).

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Famicom/NES / miscellaNEouS files
« on: November 05, 2023, 06:21:31 PM »
I've ended up with a rather large selection of random NES files that I haven't released anywhere, generally obtained from hack testing and whatnot. Since I've never really found a place to put these, I figured making a miscellaneous thread here could be a good way to distribute them.

To start, here are three hacks obtained from some quite obscure multicarts. Down Deep (a Dig Dug hack) was unplayable within the multicart itself, while Route-16 Moto (hack of Route-16 Turbo) was on a plug & play thing that I couldn't get to emulate properly (it's somewhere on Clusterrr's website...) Dungeon Escape was playable on the multicart iirc, though it's a very obscure game variant regardless.

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Famicom/NES / 88-in-1 + unused hacks
« on: November 03, 2023, 04:20:55 PM »
Among numerous other consoles, an "88-in-1 Joystick" Famiclone was recently added to MAME. This system is effectively a variant of the common "Arcade Action II" 101-in-1 that has been circulating online for years, with the removal of a few games in exchange for a bunch of Cube Technology VT02 hacks (which are quite uncommon compared to the Inventor hack library).

For whatever reason, there are two unused - and as far as I know, undocumented - games in its code: Bon Bon and Air-Launch, hacks of Devil World and Raid on Bungeling Bay, respectively. There may be some other unused games in it as well, though these two stuck out to me given I had never seen them before. Downloads of the two games (alongside an iNES-headered copy of the 88-in-1) are attached below. There is also a 5-in-1 cartridge for this console, though I do not have a copy of the ROM for it currently.

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2000-present / Nice Code "Go Retro Portable" copyright restorations
« on: September 10, 2023, 03:01:36 PM »
On several recent plug & plays featuring the Nice Code VT02 library, the original copyright notices for the games (Power Joy Ltd, Nature Color Game, etc.) are intact on the games' title screens; such notices are almost always blanked out on older consoles. In particular, this includes the Retro-Bit Go Retro Portable, as well as an uncommon My Arcade 220-in-1, which was seemingly only released on the European market.

The consoles with the copyrights intact have not yet been dumped; though since the differences in these ROMs effectively only amount to the copyright notices, I attempted to restore a large majority of them. Using preexisting copies of the games (with the copyrights erased), I restored the copyright notices based on screenshots of the title screens. In most cases, the blank space is directly coded to fit the specific copyright byline, indicating that these are fully accurate in coding - or at least very close to it. The secret Power Joy screens (accessed via the code Up, Down, Up, Left, Right, Left, B) are also retained when possible.

In total, 47 games have had their copyrights restored here, out of around 55 unique copyright variations seen on the new plug & plays. Games which already had an identical copyrighted version available in ProjectPnP (as well as a few NX-85 rips) have been skipped; though games with a tilde ("~") in the ProjectPnP filename, from what I recall, indicated an unverified copyright restoration, so the copyrights have been visually verified for those games. See the included .txt files for additional info; download attached below.

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Game Boy / Question about PocketNES extracts
« on: August 15, 2023, 02:33:01 PM »
This is a random thing I've known about for a while, which I've never really found an answer to. On Maxzhou88's website (a former Super Game developer for those unaware), there is a Game Boy Advance 30-in-1 "test" multicart featuring mainly PocketNES conversions. In this multicart is one (1) otherwise-undumped game; a hack of the Famiclone Astrosmash port titled "Defend Homestead". I'm rather intrigued by this hack, mainly as it appears to be quite early compared to the numerous other hacks of the game; making it possibly the "first" hacked Intellivision-NES game.

I have seen in some ROM sets that it is possible to extract and convert PocketNES games back into standard NES roms; however, I cannot find any documentation on how this is done. The games in the 30-in-1 appear to be somewhat compressed or something; as a test, I attempted to separate the Lode Runner PRG from the multicart, and it appears to be ~800 bytes shorter than the actual NES rom (going by the start and end points of the game). Does anyone know how PocketNES games can be extracted like this, and/or how to circumvent the compression? 30-in-1 rom attached.

10
Other Pirates / A legal Coleco conspiracy
« on: December 07, 2022, 02:12:27 AM »
I was attempting to edit the AtGames page on the BootlegGames Wiki, as I noticed the list of "pirated games" was a bit lacking. I recalled hearing that two old Sega games, Zaxxon and Space Fury, appeared on some AtGames consoles seemingly without license. Some consoles even have a bizarre "sequel" to the latter called Ms. Space Fury, which really just defies all explanation...

In researching, however, I came across something strange. In the game lists, both Zaxxon and Space Fury are apparently the ColecoVision versions; and are licensed solely through "Coleco", not Sega. I suppose it could make sense for - through some weird 80s contract - Coleco to own the rights solely for the ColecoVision ports. However, it goes much, much deeper...

As it turns out, there are lots of games "licensed" in this way. So much, in fact, that I can only count eight games licensed through Coleco that would logically be owned by them; the other thirty-seven would not be. Notable titles among this catalog include Konami's Antarctic Adventure, Taito's Jungle Hunt, Universal's Space Panic, Exidy's Pepper II, and dozens of others. Furthermore, a majority of these games have seemingly-fradulent trademark registries; either registered by Coleco directly, or a number of weird other companies that seem to connect back to Coleco. This has evidently been going on for about a decade; and with all this in mind, I'm shocked that I've never seen anyone bat an eye to it.

Does anyone know what the deal is here? I'm really lost as to what's truly going on...

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Mega Drive/Genesis / Pain of the Pocket Player
« on: September 17, 2022, 05:44:45 PM »
With the recent decoding of the NX-85's code scrambling, it occurred to me that the My Arcade "Pac-Man Pocket Player" handheld does a similar thing (though applying to the full data, not just graphics). That console is based on Sega Genesis/Mega Drive clone hardware, but features a newly-created Genesis port of Pac-Man; which as far as I know was never used anywhere else.

Out of curiosity, I analyzed the code of the Pocket Player, and found that the swapping method is quite simple. Using an extract of the Pac-Man ROM, I attempted to decode it using the EEPROM Pin Swapper tool used with the NX-85; but no matter what I input, I can't get it to unscramble correctly. I can get basically half of it to unscramble with the EEPROM tool; the rest I could logically do by hand, but I'd much rather do it by machine if that's a possibility.

Can anyone think of a way to decode this properly? The technical details are as follows. I have also attached the unaltered Pac-Man code if anyone wants to experiment with it.

Quote
Every line of code has its bytes flipped backwards, divided into sets of four sections. Pattern example:

00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F (standard)
03 02 01 00 07 06 05 04 0B 0A 09 08 0F 0E 0D 0C (pocket player)

By swapping pins A0 and A1 in the EEPROM Pin Swapper, the pattern is halfway fixed in a pattern like this:

03 01 02 00 07 05 06 04 0B 09 0A 08 0F 0D 0E 0C (a0-a1 pin swapper output)

Trying to swap pins A4 to A9, or any of the D pins, seems to screw the code up.

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2000-present / "Pikachu5" (Pikachu Wonder Rabbit?)
« on: August 06, 2022, 06:32:59 PM »
Fairly recently, a bootleg plug & play was produced called the Game Station 5 (or "GS5"); modeled after the PlayStation 5. I've known of this console for a while now; but watching videos, it clearly just had that one overabundant 200-in-1 menu (with a basic Nice Code-Inventor mix), just with the first 40 or so games replaced with actual NES titles.

Apparently, however, there are two Game Station 5 models; one with the 200-in-1, and a seemingly less common 1280-in-1 (model no. "NX-85"). Judging by video footage, on the 1280 game model - thrown in the "Etc. Game" category at #305 - is a game labeled "Pikachu5".

Pikachu5 appears to be the long-lost Pikachu version of Wonder Rabbit; which I've... literally been actively trying to find for like, half a decade. The preview image definitely looks like Wonder Rabbit (matching colors etc.), and shows a Moai head which is visible in Wonder Rabbit's CHR data. However, I can't find any videos of the Pikachu5 game being played; and the console itself, while common-ish, poses the risk of me accidentally buying crappy 200-in-1 versions trying to obtain it.

Does anyone here have further information on "Pikachu5", be it from owning this console or somewhere else? Picture of menu attached (sourced from https://youtu.be/0QWX8AZDc8s).

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Famicom/NES / Prototype games on vintage multicart?
« on: July 13, 2022, 05:28:27 PM »
The other day, I came across a video of a 32-in-1, reset-based multicart (https://youtube.com/watch?v=eO2rswXGHZc). Bizarrely, all of the games are 256k titles (meaning the cart is seemingly 8 MB?), with two of them being well-known, unreleased games: Bio Force Ape and Time Diver Eon Man. I also noticed that Solomon’s Key 2 resembles a known, NTSC prototype revision (mainly evident by the “Biginning” menu typo).

This multicart looks pretty vintage from the thumbnail preview picture (probably mid-to-late 90s?); which would indicate this isn’t just a case of copying internet ROMs, as Bio Force Ape in particular wasn’t dumped for many years. Does anyone know more about this cartridge, or if it’s been analyzed to make sure these aren’t undocumented beta revisions?

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Pirated Work / 64-in-1 Classic Player (custom Famicom/NES multicart)
« on: April 01, 2022, 12:54:53 AM »
I haven't been around this forum much recently, but I wanted to share a little project here; which has been in the works for ages, and has now officially been released.

This is the "64-in-1 Classic Player": a fan-made multicart I developed with 64 of my own Famicom/NES hacks. This is effectively what became of my multicart I "announced" (in an. admittedly terrible way that no one even understood) on this forum around 2018 or so; though it's gone through many, many changes since then. It is based on the "Game Prince RS-1" hardware-wise, and was designed to resemble the bootleg "plug & play" Famiclones.

I have attached a download of the complete ROM below, alongside a preview picture. For a complete development archive (including single-game ROMs and other little tidbits), see the following link (hosted on archive.org): https://archive.org/details/64in1.

(And for the tech-savvy folk here: there are several "secret" games which can only be accessed via debugging. Can you find them?)

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Famicom/NES / Opening strange NES "compressed" formats?
« on: August 22, 2021, 09:00:24 PM »
I came across a Russian YouTube channel by the name of "Всё Китай" (https://www.youtube.com/c/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%91%D0%9A%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%A0%D0%A3), which reviews a bunch of plug & play-ish consoles and whatnot. Generously, some of the videos' descriptions link to full dumps of the SD card directories for the consoles - some of which include NES ROMs.

...In most cases, however, all of the ROMs are in strange, seemingly compressed formats. Some consoles have ".ncs" files (in https://youtu.be/8yFOGyDk1QM & https://youtu.be/ti4cVkOJuek), another has ".zfc" files (in https://youtu.be/1LXntKWCizY), etc. While I messed around with some files to experiment, I couldn't figure out any way to turn them back into proper ".nes" file format. Does anyone have a clue as to how the ROMs could be properly extracted?

I'm guessing there's nothing unique on these, they all seem to be (badly) renamed internet ROMs; though I did see a few curious names that I don't recognize (like "Gird Dance.ncs", and completely indecipherable crap like "d4cjqrdz.ncs"). I think it's worth checking over to see if anything unique is buried in these...

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